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Around the Wassail Bowl 2013

Posted on January 6, 2014

So what did I do on my Christmas vacation?

Not much. That was kind of the point.

I headed back to my old home town, to the old homestead, where once my brother read comic books under the blankets by the light of his own halo. (I sneaked a peek at his upcoming autobiography, Making of a Blithe Poet.) This is a place we choose to go there together to gather in glee (to quote Walt Kelly.) While there, I did a certain amount of Christmassing, but was also involved in various philosophical considerations, as behooves a blogger.

I noted that 12-30-2013 was a date in which the first four digits were a rearrangement of the last four. This will happen again, for people with digital calendars, at least, on 01-24-2014, and on Valentine’s Day 02-14-2014. That was about as strenuous as my thinking got (see first two sentences of this column) except when I was wondering whether a Christmas tree was iconic or pine-conic.

I read a book catalog in which the How To and Reference books were all collected under the heading “Science and Nature”. No, I do not plan on using this sort of classification in July. I stood around at the hardware store as a man reminisced about the night his house of worship caught fire and noted, “I thought: Holy smokes! That’s the church!” Nobody else laughed, so I may have been the only one who noticed.

And I watched a number of Bowl games in which the wrong teams kept winning. The most entertaining part of this exercise was noting the new names of so many bowls: the Discover Orange Bowl (I discovered orange a long time ago, friends, but we pioneers are forgotten these days), the Belk Bowl, and the ever popular Advocare V100 Bowl (previously the Poulan Weed-eater Independence Bowl).

I was explaining this to someone and should have expected the question, “Why isn’t there a Newberry Book Fair Bowl?”

I suppose this is not unreasonable. (There was a California Raisin Bowl, y’know.) But besides the fact that December and January are half the year around from July, making the advertising value a bit remote, there would be unending confusion involved. Let’s say Uncle Blogsy is trying to cut a deal, and calls the Athletic Director at the University of Southern North Dakota.

“Hi! I’m wondering if the SUND Snails would like to play in the Newberry Bowl!”

“Oh, is that the outfit with the commercials about those two men standing out in the bog?”

“No, that’s cranberry juice.”

“Ah, you’ve got that fat little guy who giggles when you poke his tummy.”

“I’m not that litt…no no, that’s Pilsbury!”

“You mean it’s for that actress in the tight leather suit.”

“That’s Halle….ah, forget it.”

And the confusion in other places! I can just see a donor to the Newberry’s Annual Fund turning up at the A.C. (After Christmas) McClurg Bookstore with a voucher, and complaining, “This says I get a free cap or mug, but I want one of those Newberry bowls!”

No, the Book Fair will continue to support sporting events, but in a more rational way. Like supplying books for Ya-Ya Sisterhood Night at Wrigley Field.

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